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Hard to believe the first month of the last quarter of the year is almost over. Hopefully you’re already out in front of those 2025 calls with only five or so weeks really left in the year to do business. In this week’s sales meeting, I want to talk about one of sports radio’s biggest assets, its audience.
More than 20 years ago, I was a Program Director in Memphis when I realized that whenever I talked about the radio station, I would get really excited and energized. I thought that could be an asset on sales calls and so I started joining the sales team whenever they would ask me to go out on calls. Eventually, I started setting my own appointments and doing my own meetings.
I had met a corporate attorney at an alumni event for Ole Miss athletics. We had great conversation throughout the night on many different topics, but one of those topics was radio advertising. He was a believer and spent a decent amount on radio but pretty early in the conversation he had said he had not been on our station because he “didn’t really understand who the audience is.”
After bringing the topic of the audience up a few more times to really try and understand what he didn’t get, I deduced his beliefs were he could reach women on FM music stations and men with money on news talk radio. He said when he thinks of sports radio he thinks of the callers and while he can see a fit for traffic tickets or “ambulance chasers,” he didn’t think it would be a fit for what he did.
Our station was the flagship for the Memphis Grizzlies, and we had access to suite tickets, so I invited him to join me at a game later that week. In between, I tried to come up with the best ways to answer his objections about the audience.
Throughout the game, he saw several people he knew, and we could see inside some of the other suites and discussed which business owners we saw. We talked about the sponsorships we saw around the venue. As I was taking this all in, I realized I literally had the answer right in front of me.
When a big moment happened late in the game and the crowd erupted, we jumped up and he gave me a high-five. I leaned over and said, “This is our audience.”
When we later talked business, I recapped who we saw, the other businesses connected to the team, the amount of money people needed to have who attended, especially those in the lower bowl. A lot of those people are our listeners. Passionate sports fans, who also happen to have money and own businesses.
Somehow in the early days, sports radio was judged on the regular callers, which we all know represents a very small percentage of the audience. Regardless, that was the perception. The truth is the audience is one of the number one reasons to buy sports radio. We should be highlighting the audience, making sure any objection about it is answered early on before it can even become an objection.
This situation also underscores the need to get clients and certain prospects out to games, out to where the sports audience is. In addition to being a great opportunity to connect with them and share the commonality of being a fan of the team, even subliminally it reminds them of the audience being reached with their sports advertising.
The same can be said about big station events. Take your clients, show them a good time, have them hang out with the on-air talent and the staff. Make them feel good about what they are investing their money in.
I often say that salespeople need to be concerned a lot about tie breakers. What I mean by that is if it comes down to it and your sponsor has to cut either your station or someone else’s station, you want to be the one that wins the tie. Your service and your expertise come in to play but let’s not forget that people want to be treated well and feel like they are a part of something.
Let’s show off the audience and not shy away from it. Painting the picture of who will be listening when the ads are read or played for the audience can help the business owner visualize those people coming into his/her business.
Showing business owners the audience is even better.
Dave Greene is the Chief Media Officer for Barrett Media. His background includes over 25 years in media and content creation. A former sports talk host and play-by-play broadcaster, Dave transitioned to station and sales management, co-founded and created a monthly sports publication and led an ownership group as the operating partner. He has managed stations and sales teams for Townsquare Media, Cumulus Media and Audacy. Upon leaving broadcast media he co-founded Podcast Heat, a sports and entertainment podcasting network specializing in pro wrestling nostalgia. To interact, find him on Twitter @mr_podcasting. You can also reach him by email at Dave@BarrettMedia.com.
